The Dog Aging Project, for its part, has conducted a small-scale clinical trial of 24 companion dogs that looked at the effects of a drug called rapamycin. To date, the project has produced dozens of studies exploring dog behavior, genetics, and neurobiology, across breeds and over time. In fact, when the Family Dog Project - to which she contributes - was pioneered by a group of Hungarian ethologists in 1994, many thought the idea was ridiculous, Kubinyi says. Scientists had long considered dogs to be “artificial animals” with unnatural behavior, says ELTE ethologist Enikő Kubinyi, who has studied cognition in pet dogs for nearly 30 years. But if you study pet dogs, says Kaeberlein, there’s no need to. You can’t model a complex human environment in the laboratory.
And though scientists often want to study their subjects in the controlled environment of a laboratory, the fact that pet dogs live in highly variable homes alongside people is actually a benefit when trying to glean insights that transfer to human aging. Their genetic diversity makes them better animal models than the inbred strains of mice that are typically used in aging research. Studying dogs has other advantages as well. (Though dog lifespan is strongly linked to body size, with Bernese mountain dogs averaging seven years and Chihuahuas nearly doubling that at 13 years, broadly speaking, a 70-year study in people is roughly equivalent to one dog decade.) But it makes dogs an excellent model system for studying aging. “This sucks for people who love their dogs,” says Kaeberlein, a lifelong dog lover. It means tracking people for 50, 60, 70 years or more, which can be laborious and expensive. But following the life journeys of some of these canine companions could provide hints that help people age more healthily as well, including what dogs might reveal about our own aging brains.īecause human aging takes place over many decades, studying the biology of that process is challenging. With estimates of the number of pet dogs in the world reaching into the hundreds of millions, understanding how they age is important in its own right - to help improve their lives and the care they receive. The two projects have begun collaborating across continents, and the scientists hope that such a large combined group of dogs can help them tease out genetic and environmental factors that affect how long dogs live and how much of that time is spent in good health. The effort joins that of an earlier one: the Family Dog Project, spearheaded in the 1990s at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest to study “ the behavioral and cognitive aspects of the dog-human relationship,” with tens of thousands of canines participating through the decades. From all of this, scientists hope to spot patterns and find links between lifestyles and health from puppyhood through the golden years. Smaller subsets of the dogs, including Hana, will participate in more focused studies and more extensive evaluations.
Through veterinary records, DNA samples, health questionnaires, and cognitive tests like Hana’s treat-finding challenge, the initiative of the University of Washington and Texas A&M University will track many aspects of dogs’ lives over time. Understanding the biology of aging in companion dogs is one of two main goals of the project, says co-founder and co-director Matt Kaeberlein, a pathologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who focuses on aging. Hana is part of a pack that has grown to nearly 40,000 pet dogs enrolled in a citizen science initiative known as the Dog Aging Project, founded in 2014. Hana and her human companion, Masami Shimizu-Albergine of Bainbridge Island, Washington, are helping scientists to learn something too: when dog smarts reach their peak and how they decline with age. After viewing the contents of three identical boxes arrayed in an arc on the back deck of her home, the 3-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel had to remember which box held a treat - a task she quickly learned after just a few trials.
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